outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

How it started/how it’s going

in case anyone feels bad about making fun of this dipshit

This was Deputy Trujillo’s last post on Instagram https://t.co/c1Z0nl8PcC pic.twitter.com/QEnmEZnlip

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) May 28, 2021

Haven’t been this cheered by a Duke death in oh about a month

I'm not cheered, tbh, I feel like evil forces DID this to this guy

The evil forces are coming from inside the housecop.

Darwin Awards gonna be drawing from a crowded pool this year.

I mean also noted in that thread is that he was suspended in 2014 for beating a suspect in jail, he was the evil forces

Some of those that work forces are the same that have dry coughs.

has his immune system given public statements yet

can't believe he owned the libs by dying

ACAB-19

This doesn't seem quite the right thread for LOLz but nonetheless...

Nothing beats Herman Cain in that dept.

truly nobody, living or dead

A group of 117 unvaccinated staffers from Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to avoid the hospital’s coronavirus vaccine mandate, saying it’s unlawful for bosses to require the shots.

The staffers join a growing list of employees challenging compulsory immunizations at businesses, colleges and other workplaces essential to the country’s reopening. Vaccine mandates have faced mounting resistance from anti-vaccination groups and some Republican politicians, even as health officials promote the proven safety of the vaccines and millions of Americans line up to get the shots every week.

The lawsuit against Houston Methodist was filed by Jared Woodfill, a Houston-area attorney and conservative activist. It appears to mirror a legal strategy used by a New York-based law firm, Siri & Glimstad, that is closely aligned with one of the country’s biggest anti-vaccination organizations but unaffiliated with the Houston litigation.

The complaint, filed in state court, says Houston Methodist’s vaccine mandate violates a set of medical ethics standards known as the Nuremberg Code, which was designed to prevent experimentation on human subjects without consent. The code was created after World War II in response to the medical atrocities Nazis committed against prisoners in concentration camps.

“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” the complaint states. It adds that the mandate “requires the employee to subject themselves to medical experimentation as a prerequisite to feeding their families.” Elsewhere, it falsely characterizes the coronavirus vaccines as an “experimental COVID-19 mRNA gene modification injection.”

...
Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, said it was legal for health-care institutions to require vaccines. Houston Methodist has done so for the flu vaccine for more than a decade.

“As health-care workers, it is our sacred obligation to do whatever we can to protect our patients, who are the most vulnerable in our community,” Boom said in an email Saturday. “We proudly stand by our employees and our mission to protect our patients.”

Boom announced the mandate at the end of March, setting a June 7 deadline for employees to get the shots. As of Saturday, 99 percent of Houston Methodist’s 26,000 staffers had met the requirements, Boom said.

“It is unfortunate,” he said, “that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/29/texas-hospital-vaccine-lawsuit/

great, you fucking idiots, you made me approvingly quote a health care ceo

good luck winning your upcoming wrongful termination lawsuit here in Texas

“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment”

These 'experimental' vaccines are currently undergoing the largest human trials ever conducted, involving more than 150,000,000 human ‘guinea pigs’ just in the USA alone. All the data being collected during this mega-massive-supersized human trial replicate and substantiate the findings during the much more modest trials that preceded their conditional approvals.

What more do these fuckers want?

Interesting. FWIW the vaccine is not compulsory for NHS workers in the UK, or any other groups of workers that I know about.

there are still a lot of conservatives who believe (or at least say out loud) that they think "more research" is needed on climate change

before they're willing to admit it even exists, i mean. of course more research is always needed on it, so we can have a better idea of how we annihilated ourselves

we have over 100 years of solid, publicly-reported data that’s pretty clear on it tbh

Being a guinea pig seems pretty awesome tbf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq9ghmgqoyc

"more research" means "I don't like the conclusion", just like when libs whine about GMOs and say "more research" is needed.

Anti-GMO types heavily overlap with antivaxxers, “libs” doesn’t quite seem to describe this kind of person.

It's not that GMO is directly harmful humans in terms of ingesting GMO products. People can eat them without apparent ill effect. I just wish GMO were used for purposes other than cranking out proprietary seed stock that tolerates ever heavier applications of glyphosate (RoundUp). Even decades into the GMO adventure, this remains the single dominant use of GMO technology in food crops.

Maybe some day this won't be true and the ever-receding promise of hardier, more drought-resistant, or more nutritious crops will finally get out of the 'demonstration project' phase and improve agriculture in ways that do not simultaneously encourage treating the living soil as a sterile medium for massive petrochemical applications.

Maybe... more nutritious crops will finally get out of the 'demonstration project' phase

Is more research needed?

Aimless otm. Also, the idea that mRNA vaccines might possibly come back to bite us in ways that we/scientists didn’t anticipate doesn’t seem like a ridiculous notion to me. Didn’t stop me from taking the vaccine though.

Ideally, GMO crops would deliver the same sorts of benefits that hybridization has been delivering for millennia, such as bigger yields, better taste, better adaptation to specific climates, more drought resistance, longer life when stored, etc. So far, I'm not aware of any of these benefits having emerged in a volume capable of supplanting any important hybridized crops.

All I've seen in widespread use so far are GMO crops with resistance to a particular herbicide, so farmers can apply that herbicide more often and in greater quantity. It's petrochemical weeding. GMO is touted as a fucking agricultural miracle, the magic answer to feeding the billions.

RoundUp resistance is not the miracle I was really looking for. Is that the GMO miracle you wanted? Cuz that's the one we've got so far. Fuck whether "more research" is the answer. More results. More benefits. That seems to be what's lacking.

One thing you can do is get tomatoes to express the gene that produces capsaicin which is pretty cool

You ask for miracles Theo, I give you... spicy fucking tomatoes

Mas de 180 000 peruanos muertos por el Covid. Una tragedia nacional. Dos veces y media la cantidad de fallecidos durante el periodo de violencia 1980 - 2000.

— Jose Alejandro Godoy (@jgodoym) May 31, 2021

God's judgement for others, Hell's judgement for me

Wiles reports that he has been released from the hospital, but several family members and employees are now very sick. https://t.co/b91NEAAvZX pic.twitter.com/PFvgtFAHC8

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 1, 2021

To stop associating the variants with specific countries they will be called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,...
https://gizmodo.com/british-and-indian-variants-renamed-alpha-and-delta-und-1847006007

Result: the Greek are offended

As a Greek I am deeply offended by the appropriation of our ancient and magnificent alphabet to name coronavirus variants!
What fresh hell is this?
(By the way if you think Greek letters are easier to say you have no idea how Greeks cringe when non Greeks pronounce them!) https://t.co/N0T9jZuwbx

— Theodora (@theodora_nyc) May 31, 2021

Think the WHO erred in assigning Greek characters to the variants of interest as well.

The VOIs haven't received more than a small fraction of media coverage that the variants of concern have, and given vaccination rates in the developing world, Covid will be a global health concern for months to years to come. I fear the WHO will run out of Greek characters.

they can use Beanie Babies then

I am deeply offended

(gently lifts right hand to head and places it against forehead, palm out, while tilting head slightly backward)

It does seem like a stupid idea tbh.

It's in line with the WHO's best practices for naming new human infectious diseases from 2015.

“In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security, WHO. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”

Neutral names are a good idea. And the existing scientific nomenclature was terrible for media coverage.

National Geographic: How virus variants get their confusing names—and why that’s changing

“Who wants to keep saying 501Y.V2?” Abdool Karim says. “501Y.V2 is such a mouthful to say. It’s a terrible name. You wouldn’t want to call your child 501Y.V2.”
...
“I have no doubt that the associations between COVID-19 and China and the stigma around that has been unfortunately critical to the rise in anti-Asian hate crime around the world,” he says. This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The spread of infectious disease has been a powerful force for justifying racism and xenophobia for centuries.

But there’s also a scientific argument for staying away from geographical names: Scientists point out that the names are misleading at best and totally inaccurate at worst. The truth is that scientists don’t know where the so-called South African variant actually originated. Sure, the variant was first identified in South Africa, but researchers haven’t yet found patient zero. It’s possible that South Africa was just the first country to find the variant because it was doing more genetic sequencing than other countries. Abdool Karim also says the label is misleading because the variant has spread throughout the world and is now more prevalent in places like the United States than it is in South Africa. “So you can see how crazy it is to call it the South African variant,” he says.

I wouldn't name my child "Mad Cow Disease" either

up until this year, the World Meteorological Organization would name any tropical storm/hurricane after the 21st storm of the season using the Greek Alphabet. they stopped only due to preventing confusion, as apparently people were dumb and thought Hurricane Alpha wasn't a real hurricane.

beginning this year, they're just adding more first names instead

xp: To be fair, "Monkey Pox" has charm as a nickname.

Lemme go ask my children if being named after a disease is a bad thing. Their names are Sam and Ella.

lol

Hi, Philip Perlman here, and these are my kids Donna and Rhea

Those bastards in Kent have a lot to answer for.

not Kent, alpha

Alpha Men or Men of Alpha.

“To get 70% of the planet’s population inoculated by April, the IMF calculates, would cost just $50 billion. The cumulative economic benefit by 2025, in terms of increased global output, would be $9 trillion, to say nothing of the many lives that would be saved.”

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/06/09/the-west-is-passing-up-the-opportunity-of-the-century

oh well!